Beautiful Losers Review

8/7/2019 Beautiful Losers Review

1/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

Allthe Polarities

Linda Hutcheon

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS has been called everything from obscenean d revolting to gorgeous an d brave. For a Canadian work it has received con

siderable international attention, yet few literary critics have dared take it

seriously. Along with The Energy of Slaves, which shares its themes an d imagery,

this novel stands as a culminating point in Cohen's development. It may also be

the most challenging an d perceptive novel about Canada and her people yet

written.

Cohen plays with the novel structure bu t the essential unity of th e work lies

outside the temporal an d spatial confines of plot an d character, in the integrityof the images. Th e first book, "The History of Them All," is the tortured con

fession of a nameless historian-narrator whose prose is as diarrhetic as his body is

constipated. "A Long Letter from F.," written from an asylum for the criminally

insane by the brilliant, erratic revolutionary-tyrant, presents us with th e narrator's

teacher and his "system," seen from the perspective of failure. The final fantasy

of F.'s escape leads into "Beautiful Losers: an epilogue in the third person". In

formal novelistic terms this is the most traditional part, yet even here characters

an d temporal sequences merge an d we are finally addressed by yet another

narrative voice.

Whatever plot there is here, its interest is minimal. If the characters enlist our

attention at all it is due to their articulate natures. There is little doubt that, if

not obscene - whatever that word might mean - the language of this novel is

sexual and sensual. Michael Ondaatje claims: "To write Beautiful Losers in a

safe formal style would have been to castrate its powerful ideas and its vulgar

sanctity."! "There are no dirty words - ever,"? adds Cohen. Yet there does


2/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

seem to be a specific thematic reason for using the language of often vulgar

sexuality in the way in which Cohen does. As in his entire ceuore, it is as ifhe is

trying to force the reader to face his sexuality: "Undress, undress, I want to cryout, let's look at each other. Let's have education." The language may well be a

deliberately constructed obstacle to be dealt with before the seriousness of the

novel can be perceived. At the separatist rally, for instance, the narr ator rivets

our attention on the female hand caressing his genitals, while the crucial theme

of the English domination of French Canada is being presented in the back

ground in the words of the speaker.

This theory does not, however, account for the pop music and comic book

talk: "Smack! Wham! Pow!" Nor does it explain the disintegration of language

that takes place in Book One. No doubt part of this is deliberate "con," for

Cohen admits he is never totally devoid of that. Yet, as a novel dealing ironically

with identity in its private and public dimensions, it also presents the modem

vision of alienation in the nameless narrator, the character who most painfully

suffers from disintegrating verbal structures. Neither his ideas nor his language

ever takes shape firmly, despite his academic roots in the past.

As a folklorist he can draw his imagery from many mythologies - Amerindian,

Egyptian, Greek. Mostly he tends to systematize a modem mythos gleaned from

comics, radio and movies. His temple is the System Theatre and Gavin Gate

rules : "You are the king of some slum block and you have handed down Laws."

Despite its being steeped in "Canadiana", the novel, like the rest of Cohen's

work, is also biblical in its imagery and structure. Like the Bible, Beaut iful Losers

is both social and individual in scope. However, as in most modem ironic

literature, the poles are no longer moral ones of good and evil, but existential

ones of identity and alienation. Both works are epics of a people and a man, and

despite their historical skeletons, the essential unity of each is organic rather than

linear.Indeed the novel often seems an ironic or demonic parody of the Bible. Faith

is replaced by magic. The continuous creation - the "begats" - loses out to an

entire cast of orphans. The Bride and Bridegroom, presented traditionally in

Kateri and Christ, are parodied in Edith and the Danish Vibrator (the D.V. !) .

The temporal dimension of the Bible is essentially a present - it happens as it

is being read; F. insists that he will show the narrator "how it is happening" in

his letter. In the novel the apocalyptic imagery of the Eucharist becomes real

cannibalism, among other things, in a demonic tale of torture and mutilation.

The redemptive sacrifice of the body and blood, the bread and wine, is presented

43


3/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

in Catherine, the "lily out of the soil watered by the Gardener with blood of

martyrs." This white/red imagery is picked up ironically in the basic conflict of

the novel- between White Man and Red Man. Catherine even converts to thewhite race after her death. The Indian Edith wants to be someone else too, so

plans an unappreciated surprise for her husband, who tells us: "she was waiting

for me all covered in red grease and I was thinking of my white shirt." Not long

after this she is a bloody corpse at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Perhaps the most important use of this imagery comes at th e French dinner

party at which Catherine spills her wine. The red stain spreads over th e white

table cloth, the guests, an d even "drifts of spring snow darkened into shades of

spilled wine, and the moon itself absorbed the imperial hue." Th e narrator

begins the next section with: "It is my impression that the above is apocalyptic,"

perhaps referring to Revelation 6: 12 where the full moon becomes like blood.

He then explains the Greek origins of "apocalyptic." A hund red pages later this

is picked up in the final word of Edith's Isis speech: -apekalypsen.

These two passages and women are again linked by the narrator's definition of

the apocalyptic: it "describes that which is revealed when a woman's veil is

lifted."3 "What have I done," moans the narrator, "what have I not done, to

lift your veil, to get u nder your blanket, Kateri Tekakwit ha?"

The final scenes of the novel seem to be a deliberately literal parody of thebiblical apocalyptic vision. In Revelation 22: 14: "Blessed are those who wash

their robes that they may have the right to the tree of life an d that they may

enter the city by the gates." The filthy old man descends from the treehouse and,

between the naked legs of a woman, enters Montreal. Echoing Revelation1: 7("Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him"), the ma n

transforms into a movie in the sky, a movie of a blind negro singer in sunglasses:

"his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were

like a flame of fire" (Revelation1 : 14) .

This process of ironic reversal of images is constant throughout the novel. Just

as the tongues of fire drive the disciples out of their room to teach Christ's mes-

sage, so the firecrackers drive the narr ator out of his apartme nt to the treehouse

to become F.'s teachings incarnate. In the Bible the sea leviathan is the enemy

of the Messiah, destined to be destroyed by Him. Fallen man is born, lives an d

dies within his belly. Th e Danish Vibrator is also a source of social sterility, but

in the pansexuality of the novel it satisfies the frustrated Edith, working over the

entire surface of her body, before crashing through the window an d crawling

back to the sea.


4/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

~ I

THIS NOVEL OF IDENTITY also presents a frightening picture

of the possible tragedies of alienation facing Canada and the isolated hero. Likethe Bible, it associates the fate of the individual with that of the nation. "You've

turned Canada into a vast analyst's couch from which we dream and redream

nightmares of identity," the narrator accuses F. As he delves into his own

consciousness, the nameless man stumbles upon the truth about Canada. This

truth is closely linked with his taste for victims, for, like the novel, Cana da's past

is coloured by the blood of her defeated peoples.

Th e epigraph of the novel begins: "Somebody said lift that bale," introducing

the victim/victimizer theme which is then underlined by the continuation which

identifies the lines as Ray Charles singing "01' Man River". Although there is

no logical sense in mentioning who is singing these written words, the link with

the final vision of the novel would suggest that to become a Ray Charles movie

is not liberation for the narrator, but perhaps a symbolic capitulation to the

victimizing forces.

In "The Genius," Cohen writes:

For you

I will be a Dachau jewand lie down in limewith twisted limbs

and bloated painno mind can understand.

This vision of Nazi torture also pervades Beautif ul Losers: meat-eating humans

are "dietary Nazis" with their Dachau farmyards. The novel is laced with

incidental but constant references to the Jews, often concerning their role as a

victimized race. F. says that each generation must thankits Jews and its Indians

for making progress possible - by their victimization. Canadian literature is full

of images of a lonely, desolate wilderness, indifferent to human values. Here we

are in an increasingly urban society where man is progressively brutalized by the

city, becoming, himself, indifferent to human values. The identity of the nation

is thus inextricably bound to that of the man. The narrator unwillingly is forced

to speak for Canada: "O Tongue of the Nation! Why don't you speak for

yourself?"

In the broader social scope of the novel, Canadian history is patterned on the

process of victimizer turned victim:

45


5/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

VICTIM INDIAN

explorers tJesuits I

VICTIMIZER FRENCH

martyrs____> FRENCH

rally

ENGLISH

FLQbombs_____ ENGLISH

economy tculture I

AMERICAN

Th e Indian world here is not just the pastoral one of Pauline Johnson; it is also

the massacre and agony of "Brebeuf and his Brethren." What remains of the

former is destroyed by the French explorers and the Jesuits: "the old people

gathered at the priest's hem shivered with a new kind of loneliness. They could

not hear the raspberries breaking i nto domes." To destroy the link with nature is

to deny the source ofmythology. After his defeat in the shadow wrestling with thepriest, Catherine's uncle laments: "Our heaven is dying. From every hill, a spirit

cries out in pain, for it is being forgotten." The French even give the Iroquois

their name. The Hodenosaunee (the People of the Long House) are redefined

in terms of a phatic expression (hiro -like I said) plus a cry of joy or distress

(koue), befitting their new victim role thiro-koue - Iroquois). This same pat-

tern is repeated:

INDIAN

FRENCH

Hodenosaunee

tIroquois

Uncle's shadow

Lamberville

Kateri in camp

tCatherine in fort

Edith

tFrench rape

Catherine's uncle loses his fight for her, but wisely refuses "life-giving" baptism

for himself. Indeed, one week after Edith injects water from Lourdes and

Tekakwitha's Spring into her veins, she is found under the elevator, a "suicide."

As a child she is raped by the French townsmen who ironically call her an

Indian "heathen" as she prays to Mary and Kateri. Th e narrator feels he should

rescue Catherine at least from the French Jesuits, from the "Sinister Church."When, at her death, Catherine's skin turns white, the Jesuit interpretation is that

"Dieu favorisait les sauvages pour leur faire gofrter la foi." This racist chauvinism

disgusts F.: "Let the mundane Church serve the White race with a change of

colour."

However, it is not long before the victimizing French fall prey to the English.

F. realizes that the modern French must not make the mistake the Indians made.

The separatist rally speaker says: "The English have stolen our History! ...

History decreed that in the battle for a continent the Indian should lose to the

Frenchman. In 1760 History decreed that the Frenchman should lose to the


6/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

Englishman! ... In 1964 History decrees, no, History commands that the English

surrender this land which they have loved so imperfectly, surrender it to us!"

Yet, can the direction of the cycle be so easily reversed? F. is the main Quebecoisvoice; echoing the speaker's rhetoric, he longs for thick national boundaries

because "without independence we will be nothing but a Louisiana of the north,

a few good restaurants and a Latin Quarter the only relics of our blood."

The conquering English, however, are in turn being made the victims of their

American neighbours: it is 1776 revisited. As a Frenchman, F. claims "the

English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the

English what the English did to us." Today's attack is far more insidious, though:

it is economic" and cultural. In the novel the TV ads are from Madison Avenue,

the comics are American, as is Charles Axis. Hollywood provides modern saints.

When the narrator unpacked the firecrackers from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he

said: "I wept for the American boyhood I never had, for my invisible New

England parents, for a long green lawn and an iron deer, for college romance

with Zelda." The modern American dream is to be an immigrant sailing into

New York armed with obsolete machine guns to astound and conquer the

Indians; it is to be "Jesuit in the cities of the Iroquois".

This same victimization theme is present in the histories of the individual

characters in the novel. The story of Catherine is full of personal torture andSault 51. Louis looks like a "Nazi medical experiment". In his own agony the

narrator perceives their common bond of pain: "F. Suffered Horribly In His

Last Days. Catherine Was Mangled Every Hour In Mysterious Machinery. Edith

Cried Out In Pain." He has a taste for victims, be they fictional or real, likely

because he is the chief victim figure of the novel. F. envies him this status, yet it

is he who tortures the narrator as a boy, slicing off his wart amid screams of

sadistic approval from the other orphans. Later the narrator's hands are burned

by F.'s firecrackers. No doubt we are meant to recall F.'s lost thumb and Jogue'sthumb-torture by the Iroquois.

OF THE THREE MAIN CHARACTERS in the present (or recentpast) of the novel, one is an A-, one a French Canadian, Roman Catholic,

M.P. and revolutionary, and one is a nameless English Canadian, raised in a

Montreal Jesuit orphanage. Although these three, plus Catherine, are the main

foci of attention as individuals, we are never allowed to forget their background

47


7/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

an d the symbolic weight they bear. Desmond Pacey sees the novel as the testi

mony of a "voluntary loss of self for some higher cause.?" But just what is this

higher cause? Th e loss of self in the novel is indeed voluntary - although in anironic way - but it certainly gives way to nothing positive on a private or public

level. Pacey seems to miss the ironic tone of the novel and neglects the message

of failure in F.'s letter. Each character lives an isolated existence that ends in

some form of destruction. Sex is not even a meeting of bodies: F. excludes the

eager narrator, only to be, in tum, excluded by Edith in Argentina. Th e major

sex scenes in the novel are either oral or masturbatory.

The narrator loses his "self" through attempting to avoid acknowledging that

his salvation can only be found in solitude and from within. Instead he looks to

F., Edith, and finally Catherine. In his constipation he prays to his bowels to

make him empty so he can receive, without realizing that one's identity is not

received. "I am the sealed, dead, impervious museum of my appetite," he whines.

This imprisonment imagery is connected to his physical environment, a totally

"introverted", windowless basement apartment. It resembles, however, the "dark

tunnel" where Catherine watches the sexual embraces of others and finds her

virginal identity. At one point in his cellar torment, the narrator seems to reach

some epiphanic realization of his identity: "I care more about my red watery

throbbing thumb than your whole foul universe of orphans. I salute my monsterhood." Yet he stops short of total self-acceptance an d escapes the place of descent

into the self, entering the "cold ordinary world" to call the Early Morning

Record Gal. It is F.'s final trick to prevent the narrator's full realization of his

separate identity: the teacher still needs him for his own second chance.

In the person of F., Cohen also presents an ironic version of the isolated tragic

hero. He is the vulgar, mad revolutionary, the saint of perversity, the Moses who

leads his friend to the Promised Land, but cann ot enter himself. He is a John the

Baptist, yearning to be Christ - teaching in parables an d enigmatic saws,reversing conventional meanings in a parody of Christ's own reversals (Love

thine enemies). Th e narrator is his faithful disciple who will carry on his essence

in a rather startling literal manner. However, we must keep in mind that F. does

sing "The Great Pretender."

He is constantly conscious ofbeing the narrator's teacher. Sometimes the

student deliberately wishes to emulate the master, but at other times he has no

choice. "His style is colonizing me," he cries, "d o I have to be your monument?"

He senses that he has been trained for something, bu t is not sure just what. A

born teacher, F. manages to extend his instruction over the wide gulf of death,


8/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

planning the firecracker ordeal. At his dea th he passes the torch to his student,

demanding a further effort: "interpret me, go beyond me.... Go forth, teach

the world what I meant to be." He freely admits his ultimate failure with bothEdith and her husband.

He perceives the cause of this breakdown as lying in his "system," in the

limitations of his created, ordered vision of unity. "New systems are forced on

the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is,"

realizes the narrator. "Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be

unique.... Jesus probably designed his system so that it would fail in the hands

of other men." It is F. who creates Edith's beauty with his system. Like Breavman

in The Favourite Game, he wants to be a magician. However, he admits: "I did

not suspect the pettiness of my dream. I believed that I had conceived the vastest

dream of my generation. I wanted to be a magician. That was my idea of glory.

Here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic."

He would like to renounce the power for the essenceof creation.

Yet the narrator has not learned from F.'s errors: he too seeks a system, an

ordered vision. His mind is a needle that sews the world together into "a beauti

ful knowledge of unity". F. tries to warn him to "connect nothing," but the

student follows his practice rather than his words. Th e narrator sees everything

as "part of a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning". Th e same bonding image reappears in the Telephone Dance, in which Edith's long red finger

nails connect her to F., who then tunes in to "ordinary eternal machinery". The

Jesuit forces the old Indians to unplug their ears by painting a picture of a demon

twisting corkscrews of fire into one woman's ears. In the first use of the image,

the metaphor allows a connection with the mechanical universe; in the second,

the link with nature is severed forever. Ultimately destruction results from both

connections.

IN THE NOVEL two opposite systems are presented: the religions of the spirit and of the flesh. In their extreme forms both demand a denial

of individual identity, in favour of some vaster, more inhuman, bu t not higher

purpose. F. wants to free the body from genital tyranny. His star pupil, Edith,

agrees that all body parts are erotogenic - until none of hers co-operates, forcing

her to resort to mechanical means of satisfaction. Th e final undercutting of the

religion of the flesh is the post-Vibrator entry of Hitler and his sadistic victimiza-

49


9/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

tion of F. and Edith. On the other hand we have Catherine Tekakwitha, the

Iroquois virgin. As a child she instinctively rejects her marriage and her asexu

ality is sanctified after her conversion. When confronted by her second intended,she realizes that she has a woman's body, but declaims ownership of her flesh,

giving it to Christ. Five times in this scene a symbolic fish hovers "in a halo of

blond mist, a fish that longed for nets and capture and many eaters at the feast,

a smiling luminous fish."

This religion is also undercut in the novel, for it too represents an extreme

system: "Eve n Th e World Has A Body." Catherine's mangled body manages to

satisfy the sadistic voyeurism of the two Jesuits. Refusing marriage a third time,

she looks at the beauty of nature and laments: "O Master of Life, must our

bodies depend on these things?" Her new religion has destroyed her link with

nature and with her heritage - she has already broken her vow to her uncle.

The first step towards her colour change has been taken, paving th e way to her

reduction to a technicolour postcard and a plastic dashboard ornament. At the

end of the novel (rented to the Jesuits) she even falls victim to the political power

plays of Chur ch and State.

However, just as he was once caught between two loves, the narr ator is caught

between these two systems. He is nameless because he is the archetypal Cana

dian, the beautiful loser: "0 Reader, do you know that a man is writing this?

A man like you who longed for a hero's heart." He tries to deny the spirit, his

Jesuit orphanage heritage. He would like to deny the flesh too and be Plastic

Man. The result? F. tells him: "what a hunchback History and the Past have

made of your body." Instead of sexual fulfilment, he gets voyeuristic thrills from

history and Edith's drawers. Instead of spiritual assistance, he gets F.'s cryptic

letter and the fireworks ordeal. The low point of his life (which, paradoxically,

is a potentially positive height) is his descent into the basement apa rtment and

into his consciousness. Her e he is baptized by "fire, shit, history, love,and

loss,"bu t evades the threatening freedom that the descent offers, escaping to the alien

ating heights of the solitary treehouse. At the end of the novel he is empty, no

longer obsessed by time and his body. An orphan, he comes from nowhere and

returns to nowhere, dissolving into a movie image.

He is aware, as is F., that "there is something arrogant and warlike in the

notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his

glory." He had seen Catherine victimized by a totally spiritual system, mechanized

by the Jesuits into their political and plastic pawn. Edith has fallen prey to the

totality of the flesh and she too can only be satisfied by mechanical means. The


10/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

narrator transfers his lust to Catherine after his wife's death. He sees, thanks to

F., that the key to balance is "to fuck a saint." In order to imaginatively bring

about his "fuck cure," the narrator begins to merge the identities of his twowomen: they are both Indian orphans who die at twenty-four; both refuse food;

both once had bad complexions until a system magically transformed them ; and

both are uncanonized saints of their respective religions. F. played the narrator's

connecting game once too, sucking Edith's toes just as the priest had sucked

Catherine's, and ultimately ruining her just as the Jesuits destroyed Kateri.

This metamorphosis is completed by the addition of a beautiful blond girl in

a car in Book Three. Like Catherine she refuses the concept of marriage. Earlier

when the dead Kateri appeared in a vision, the lower half of her body was

invisible in a dazzling glow, and F. had asked the narrator: "Had she lent her

other parts to you?" Here such would indeed seem to be the case, since the girl

is naked below the armrest. Yet she is also a sexual Edith figure: she too claims:

She wears moccasins, although she is white.It is as if the trans-

figured saint and Edith had merged the two extreme systems so that the old

man-narr ator could achieve some sort of balance. When one of the priests was

not granted any visions of the dead saint, F. asked: "Where were his movies? ...

It is he whom I most resemble." Indeed it is the narrator, not F., who enters the

realm ofmovies, the Promised Lan d.

F. is the tyrant controller and magician. He knows his power and writes to his

student: "Somewhere you are dressed in hideous rags and wondering who I

was." His fantasy escape is to the forests beyond Montreal, to the treehouse

hermitage of the narrator. The student has learned his lessons well. When he

warns the little boy to keep his thigh muscles always engaged, there is a direct

verbal echo of F.'s earlier advice to him. However, as a result, the narrator has

become "a thing without a name which changed and changed itself over and

over." When he appears at the Main Shooting and Game Alley, there is someconfusion as to his identity. Everyone looks at his hand:

- It's all burnt!

- He's got no thumb.

- Isn't he the Terrorist Leader t hat escaped tonight?

- Looks more like the pervert they showed on T.V. they're combing the country

for.

- Get him out!

- He stays! He's a Patriot.

The confused temporal sequence further accentuates the merging identities.


11/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

When the boy calls the old man "Uncle," yet another triad of characters is

formed. Catherine's uncle dies defeated but unbaptized, loyal to his race. F. dies

imprisoned by the English, but still wanting to be President of the Republic ofFrench Canada. The narrator's fate is similarly equivocal.

This ambivalence seems central to Cohen's concept of the saint. His poetry is

full of imagery of "the twisted life of saints." In the novel it is F. who has "saintly

pretensions", seeing himself as Brebeuf's successor, a martyr whose blood will

water a mighty revolution. Ironically he only loses a thumb while blowing up a

statue of Queen Victoria. After his body-building success he takes over the Christ

role, previously assigned to Charles Axis who is "all compassion, he's our sacri

fice." F. always believes in systems, his own or others': "God is Alive, Magic is

Afoot."

The female characters in the novel emulate Catherine's sainthood. Edith and

the blond girl claim to be Isis. Edith, like Mary Voolnd, is the "perfect nurse,"

healing men as did Catherine. According to Frazer, Isis is "the many-named,"

and here she does indeed have many identities which all merge into an ironic

parody of the Universal Mother. Catherine is a virgin, Mary and the girl have

no normal sexual intercourse with the two men, and Edith dies with no issue.

Irony seems to be the essence of Cohen's concept of the modern saint: "Alex

ander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez pour nous." For the narrator, it is Hollywoodthat is the new haven for holiness.

But even this sainthood is not the glory, the ideal presented in the novel. A real

saint is someone who achieves a "remote human possibility," who is paradoxically

not systematized, but a "balancing monster of love." He does not control or

order or conform to any rigid system, as Catherine, Edith, and F. do. As Cohen

says in "The priest says goodbye": "Abelard proved how bright could be/the

bed between the hermitage and nunnery." Because of the systems of society, such

a balance is precarious, and Abelard becomes a beautiful loser. The true saint is

the magic of balance itself: "mind itself is Magic coursing through flesh." For

this reason the narrator must "fuck a saint" and "be magic."

This LOVE of "coin faces of problem" is the source of muchof Cohen's irony. His characters live in the modern world of Huxley's Tomorrow

and Tomorrow and Tomorrow where "Applied Science is a conjuror,' whose

bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most


12/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

petrifying of Medusas." F. sees that science, like a conquering race, chooses to

disregard the particular, beginning with "coarse naming". The Spenglerian

decline of art into technology creates its own mythology. The telephone becomesthe agent of some "benign electronic deity" and the Telephone Dance is born.

F. is at home in this world of machinery and systems. His mind plays naturally

with mechanical imagery, and he passes on this ability, although his student

associates machines primarily with pain: "Catherine Was Mangled Every Hour

In Mysterious Machinery." Their world has become tainted, willing to accept

plastic birchbark, broken Photomats, and "out of order" signs: "our little planet

embraces its fragile destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine." Even

the body is seen as a machine, "Is my body going to work?" asks the constipated

narrator. "Has the machine turned the food brown?" He learns that he must

"abandon all systems" in order to humanize his body. The saints, though, remain

mechanized like F. Edith has "leathery electrodes" for nipples, and Catherine

sees sex as "the assault ofhuman machinery".

The mechanized city of the novel victimizes the natural world. The narrator

and F. masturbate as they did when they were boys "in what is now downtown

but was once the woods." The culmination ofthe usurping vision of the machine

is the Danish Vibrator. It transforms F. from a solicitous mentor into a lustful

glutton, leaping past Edith for "those delicious electric oscillations." It finallylearns to feed itself, assaulting Edith and dehumanizing her into a "buffet of

juice, flesh, excrement, muscle to serve its appetite." Most of the other forms of

"entertainment" in the novel are similarly mechanized. While in his basement

inferno the narrator 's only contact with the world outside is his radio. Ironically

this is only a one-way communication medium, despite his abortive attempts to

call the Early Morning Record Gal. At the end of F.'s letter, the radio assumes

the form of print and takes over, as the D.V. had. The "Revenge of Radio"

prefigures the final revenge of movie in Book Three.In both The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers the movie is seen as a means

of expansion by vicarious experience: the narrator knows pain because he has

been "inside newsreel Belsen." Yet the wary reader becomes suspicious, since

Hollywood has its saints and movies are shown in the "severe limits" and "black

confinement" of the System Theatre. There is also a suggestion of superficiality,

as F.'s scant knowledge of Indians comes from a thousand Hollywood westerns.

Given this background, it is hard to see the final transformation of the narrator

into a movie as the triumph that the critics would have it. The essence of thisscene lies in its ambivalence - another word, perhaps, for balance. The narrator

53


13/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

initiates the revolution of all second chancers: "professional actors, all performing

artists, including magicians." He enters the System Thea tre but finds there is no

need to enter the system now: he is it. He could not see the movie, for "it wasautomatic and so was he!" At this, he totally relaxes, giving up all remaining

claim to his own identity, and disappears. He merges identities with F. and th e

mechanical world of system that he represents.

The narrator's performance on the street echoes and reverses F.'s fears of

what would happen ifthe newsreel escaped into the feature. F. invites the news

reel into the plot; the narrator invites the feature into the street, becoming the

newsreel, and the same feared "miasmal mixture" begins to "imperialize existence

by means of its sole quality of total corrosion." We are told that "h e enlarged thescreen, degree by degree, like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied

one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky,

and he leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed

a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were

holding hands." This ironic transfiguration image does not come as a total

surprise. In the early comic strip ad of Joe and Charles Axis: "Four thick black

words appear in the sky and they radiate spears of light ... HERO OF THE

BEACH." In F.'s Invocation to History in the Old Style, we find:

I see an Orphan, lawless an d serene,

standing in a corner of the sky,

body something like bodies that have been,

but not the flaw of naming in his eye.

We recall that when F. died, his face turned black. He always did feel that to

think oneself a negro was "the best feeling a man can have in this century."

Has the student quite literally become what the teacher desired to be? Has he

entered the Promised Land? Is the Ray Charles movie an image of the final

conqueror, the American mechanical cultural victimizer of Canada, or is it - as

the epigraph would suggest - a symbol of the ultimate victim, the black and

blind American, used for entertainment value? We cannot trust the admiring

judgment of the New Jew who, labouring happily on the lever of the broken

Strength Test, "loses his min d gracefully.... The New Jew is the founder of

Magic Canada, Magic French Quebec, and Magic America.... He dissolves

history and ritual by accepting unconditionally the complete heritage.... Some

times he is Jewish but always he is American, and now and then Quebecois."

54


14/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

The response of the New Jew to the transfiguration is contrasted to that of the

crowd: "Just sit back and enjoy it, I guess. Thank God it's only a movie." Both

reactions are ironic in the context of the movie imagery and the gradual aliena-tion and brutalization of society. The reader is left to decide if the second chance

does succeed, in the light of F.'s remark that "unless it is wrenched from fate,

the second chance loses its vitality, and it creates not criminals but nuisances,

amateur pickpockets rather than Prometheans."

The very end of the novel does not resolve this problem. It is "rented" to the

Jesuits for use as a document requesting Catherine's formal recognition as a

saint. Is the "noble heap" transformed into a black saint, yet another victim of

yet another system? Has he become magic, or is he merely another magician-

performer? The final printed paragraph is separated from the rest of the novel

and the narrative voice is hard to distinguish. Is it another, perhaps authorial

voice that says: "Welcome to you who read me today?" F. becomes a deity,

referred to by a capitalized pronoun. Like the narrator, this persona is alone with

his radio, pleading from "electrical tower". Yet the last line echoes F.'s tone and

language: "Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your

trip to the end." Is this final ambiguity the ultimate balancing that is glory in

Cohen's vision? It is as if he is deliberately trying to prevent the reader from

creating a system of interpretation, leaving him caught between unresolveddualities:

the serious

poetry

balance

identity

spirit

nature

revolutionary

saintvictim

magic

the con

obscenity

system

alienation

flesh

the machine

tyrant

sinnervictimizer

magician

The reader at times feels strangled by this "necklace of incomparable beauty

and unmeaning," and like the New Jew, "loses his mind gracefully." Is the

reader the ultimate beautiful loser?

55


15/15

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

NOTES

1 Leonard Cohen (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), p.,49.

2 N.F.B. film "Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen."

3 Edith's speech translated reads: "I am Isis, who gives birth to all, and no mortalhas lifted my veil."

4 Edith was raped in a stone quarry, or "someplace very mineral and hard, ownedindirectly by U.S. interests." The narrator also remarks that "the Forests of Quebecare mutilated and sold to America." In the Main Shooting and Game Alley, thereis a DeLuxe Polar Hunt with "two bearded, quilted American explorers. Th e flagof their nationality is planted in a drift."

5 "The Phenomenon of Leonard Cohen," Canadian Literature, 34 (Autumn, 1967),p.I8.

LAKEHEAD UNIVERSITY

REVIEWVOL. 6, NO.2

CANADA INTO THE SEVENTIES

Clara Thomas on the seventies literary scene

articles on economics, education, energy, foreign policy

new poetry by Dorothy Livesay, Robert Kroetsch

Subscriptions $3-50 annually (2 issues) ; $10- three years

(Institutions: $4.50; $12.50)

Address: Editor, LAKEHEAD UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Department of English, Lakehead University

Thunder Bay, Ontario

Documents

Beautiful Losers Review